Coverage of wireless sensor networks in the presence of transparent obstacles

One fundamental issue in the sensor networks is the coverage problem, which we would like to determine whether a region of interest is sufficiently covered by a given set of sensors. It can be considered as a measure of the quality of service (QoS) in the sensor networks. There are several efforts that design efficient algorithms to compute coverage; however, they have not considered the presence of obstacles in the corresponding region. In this paper, we present a new algorithm to compute the area covered by a set of sensors distributed in a region containing transparent obstacles with arbitrary shapes. The sensor network can be homogeneous or heterogeneous.